The use of digital images and videography has drastically increased over the last decade. Most people own one or more digital image or capture devices, e.g. a digital camera or camcorder. Almost every mobile phone includes an integrated digital camera. Many of the digital cameras in mobile phones also are capable of capturing high quality video. In short, everyone from teenagers to grandparents have at least one digital image capture device. The portability of digital cameras along with ever increasing storage capacity, has allowed users to amass large collections of digital images and videos.
Not all digital image and video formats are interchangeable. While JPEG has become a default standard for amateur digital images, professional photographers use RAW formats such as NEF for Nikon cameras, RC2 for Canon cameras, SRF for Sony cameras. Similarly, digital videos are captured in a variety of formats, including MOV for Apple files, MP2 for MPEG-2 files, MP4 for MPEG-4 files, WMV for Windows Media files, 3GP for mobile phones, or SVI for Samsung files.
The quality of lenses, image sensors, control systems, and in-camera processing vary greatly between devices. Accordingly, image and video quality varies between devices. Two image capture devices can take images of different quality even though they are at the same place at the same time and in the same environmental conditions.
Further, the nature of digital images and digital video permit a wide range of analysis and post processing. Devices can analyze an image or video and perform facial recognition, exposure analysis, white balance analyses, image stabilization, contrast analysis, subject blink analysis, or other quality analysis to determine whether the image or video was captured with the appropriate camera settings. Based on the analysis, it can be determined whether post processing could improve the image. Numerous types of post processing exist. A device can be configured to perform contrast enhancement, local contrast enhancement (i.e. digital lighting), brightness enhancement, color enhancement, color conversion, red-eye reduction, digital lighting, sharpness, straightening, noise reduction, and landscaping compiling. These analysis and post-processing techniques can be performed automatically or based on user-input, and can be used to improve the quality of captured images and video sequences.
Modern image and video formats also allow for a significant amount of context information to be stored in metadata and associated with digital images and video. Metadata can include any of the image dimensions, device maker, device model, color space, profile used, focal length, exposure time, f-stop, ISO speed rating, aperture value, flash mode, flash energy, 35 mm focal length, creation date and time, GPS coordinates, and facial recognition data. This data is sometimes referred to as EXIFF data, based on the EXIFF standard. Some of this metadata can be used with the analysis and post-processing techniques to perform image enhancement. For example, the exposure and lens settings can be used to modify the exposure settings used during processing. Other types of metadata can be used to organize images or provide context. For example, the date taken information can be used to create a timeline graph. Also, the GPS data can be used to show the location where the image was taken.
Facebook, image-sharing, or image-printing websites can be used to share images between users. But these methods do not provide the high-quality originals to the recipients. A memory card from a digital camera can be shared and the images on that memory card can be copied onto other memory cards, but this typically requires the use of a full-sized computer. Images can also be emailed from one device to another, but this requires post-event follow-up, which reduces the likelihood it will happen. Further, email providers often limit the size of emails, which forces the sender to send multiple emails or shrink the size of each image and thus reduce the quality.